


The Conversation: Fassbender and Lambert

by islasands



Category: Adam Lambert (Musician)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-14
Updated: 2011-09-14
Packaged: 2017-10-23 18:15:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/253396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/islasands/pseuds/islasands
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam Lambert and Michael Fassbender meet in the Green Room of a talk-show. They make a connection that is singularly rewarding for their individual life situations. They share what they possibly could never share with any other soul.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Conversation: Fassbender and Lambert

Part 1. The Rain Has Gentle Hands

In the Green Room, waiting his turn, Michael and another guest chatted while they watched the monitor. This show was the last thing Michael felt like doing. Not tonight. His mind was elsewhere, no particular elsewhere; tonight he just wanted his dinner, and for it to rain, and to walk his dogs in that rain.

He watched as the show host turned his attention to Adam Lambert. He knew who the man was but had never heard his music. Their introduction earlier in the afternoon had been interesting. When they shook hands their eyes had met with polite indifference but then, as though on some cue of fate, their glances had suddenly, inexplicably, shifted into stares. They had stood still and stared, hands firmly grasped, saying nothing and so far as he could tell, thinking nothing. The moment had quickly passed and they readily fell into the small talk and socially lubricating joking of strangers, but something about that moment’s connection had reminded Michael of a line from Jane Eyre, - that line about ‘sympatheic souls’. The cords between such souls. He turned his attention to the monitor. The show host was quizzing Lambert.

 “Your reputation for candour precedes you. In fact, it’s been difficult to dig up any gossip, any titillating trivia, about you at all. Right from Idol you seem to have had a pre-emptive strike policy with the media. Can you talk – candidly – about that? Was that your intention?”

Adam shrugged. “It’s not a game plan. I’m not known for reticence - or PR filters - when it comes to speaking my mind. But truth is, I have nothing to hide, not from public scrutiny at any rate. Have I ever been over-weight, do the carpets match the drapes, do I sleep naked, have I made a sex tape, what do I most fear, when and how did I ‘come out” as gay. Questions like these don’t call for opacity in reply. I can and do put my foot in it, of course. Quite a big foot, actually.” Adam waved his foot in the air.

The usual talk-show banter continued. At length, just before it was Michael’s turn to go on stage, the show host asked questions about Adam’s new album. Michael became attentive. Adam’s answers were fascinating.

“By personal I mean the album is a record of life as I find it. It’s coming from a creative energy that is essentially destructive. Sometimes you break to create. Thoughts, feelings, sensations. You break them into pieces, sometimes into finest sand. Other times you write for the machinery of pop-culture which has the regularity and common sense of any production line. It’s constructive, business as usual, writing. You use emotions, like emotion templates, to build something. They’re both valid creative processes, though the former is perhaps more costly and time consuming. For this album, I broke things.”

And on the basis of that comment, and on something else, something he sensed Adam was not saying, Michael made his decision. He joined Adam on stage where they spent most of the time swapping stories and cracking jokes, and then, as they left the stage together, he made his invitation. “Would you like to go for a drink?” Adam replied with a thoughtful, eyebrows raised, affirmative.They made their various goodbyes to the show host, producer, and fellow guests, then left by a side-door. “Thank goodness it’s raining,” Michael said as they headed down the street. “Yes, and I’m glad we don’t have umbrellas.” Adam turned his face up to the rain. “It saves me a job,” he explained. Michael understood without knowing what it was he understood. He linked his arm through Adam’s. “Do you mind?" he asked. He smiled at Adam’s surprised expression. He squeezed Adam’s arm. It dawned on him that really he was instinctively offering the man a shoulder to cry on. Why not? They had only just met but life itself was a chance encounter.

“I wish we were on a country lane,” he said. “Back home. In Ireland. The rain there has such gentle hands.”

“I could do with some of those,” Adam smiled back. Then I am right, Michael thought, to be offering my shoulder.

They stopped outside a bar. Michael opened the door for Adam. Clear blue eyes met clear blue eyes. “The song you sang, just now. On the show. It had the same hands,” Michael said.

They went inside.

Part 2: A Kiss in Your Empty Hand

“I really get what you were saying about destructive creative energy.” Michael leant forward, resting his elbows on the table, and resting his chin on his touching fingertips. “Preparing for Shame – my last role – was like that. I felt that a lot of things I take for granted about myself, things I consider as immutable, ingrained, needed to be broken apart. Things like the way I trust or don’t trust, love or don’t love, my integrity of self, my so-called integrity as a man and as an actor,- they all fell apart. I let it happen. Made it happen. I had to. Otherwise the things I needed to express in that role would have ended up clothed in generalizations of the human predicament. You know? I needed the original intentions, impulses. I needed to be the cause and not the evidence of emotions. First the cloud, then the rain. Am I raving?”

“Not at all. You’re saying things I think, feel.” Adam looked down at his hands, clasped around his glass. He looked up. “You heard some of my story on the show. In a generalizing way I could say the past two years were exciting, challenging, hugely rewarding. They were. But nakedly speaking, it’s been like living in a Dali painting. It really was like that.” He gesticulated as he continued, “The sea in my chest, a toppled tree in my brain, and my voice, whenever I happened to hear it, had four legs like a horse. It was running so fast, rushing out of me at such speed, that I wasn’t even sitting on my own galloping life. I was running behind it, holding onto the reins for dear life.”

“The sea in your chest?” Michael looked inquiringly right into Adam’s eyes. He nodded. “I can see that.” Adam flinched slightly from the clean, unmixed quality of Michael’s gaze.

“I personally would be very happy to swim in that sea.” Michael continued. “To bob up and down like a pink toy. Cold as fuck, but with the sun out.”

Adam smiled. “Well if _I’m_ out of my depth in there, you would be too.”

Michael leaned back on his chair. “Go on. Keep going. Tell me about the album.”

Adam poured himself another wine. “Well, this time round, I knew I had to break things. Like the things you mentioned - the parts of yourself that you value most. When I made my first album I was using parts of myself in the same way that you might build something out of lego. And it turned out well. Like a kid I approved- approved joyously – of what I’d made. But it also was oddly depressing. Not straight away. Afterwards. You know how that happens." Michael nodded. "I do." Adam scanned his face, as though looking for confirmation. "Well,this time round," he continued, "I knew I couldn’t do it that way. So when I took up my bludgeon, when I started writing, I discovered my most valued treasure was my honesty. I’ve always counted on being truthful in how I face up to things. But once you place an identity value on something like that, well, you’ve turned it into a possession. There’s nothing organic to it anymore. It’s no longer singing in your cells." Adam paused, almost for breath."Now I need to ask – am _I_ ranting?" he went on. "Our conversation feels a little one-sided. I know I’m rambling. Tell me more about you.”

“No. No.” Michael shook his head. “It’s a relief for me to listen. You have no idea. Listening to you feels like I’ve dropped a bucket into a well and I’m pulling it up and its brimming with cold black water for which I have a particular thirst. You’re making more than just good sense. I could kiss you for your words. In fact,’ Michael suddenly took a punt on his instincts,”in fact I want to do just that, if I may. I’ve drunk up our talk. Now I want you to roll up your sleeve.”

“My sleeve?”

“Your sleeve.”

Adam frowned, unsure, but nevertheless slowly pushed up the sleeve covering his right arm. Michael reached over the table and took hold of his forearm. Squeezing it firmly, he ran his thumb down the forearm, over the wrist, over the sensitive ligaments of the palm, down to the tip of his middle finger. “You have the hands of a ploughman,” he said. He turned Adam’s hand over. He looked into Adam’s eyes. “We seldom show our hands to one another in this way. Maybe in prayer. Maybe to catch rain. Maybe to show we give up. We give in.” He leaned over the table, bent his head, and slowly kissed the centre of Adam’s palm. He continued kissing it, and the underside of his wrist and forearm, and back again. All three places.

He sat up, but didn’t immediately release Adam’s hand. “The song you sang touched me. Its truths were as helplessly truthful as grass is green. It made me want to leave a kiss in your empty hand.” Now he laid Adam’s hand, still with the palm facing upward, on the table. “Well done, ploughman. Your field produced a good crop.”

Adam looked at his hand. He closed his fingers tight, as though upon a physical object. He sighed deeply. He smiled at Michael.

“Where are you staying?” Michael asked. “I want to eat, and drink, and lie down somewhere, and continue our conversation.” 

 _To be continued..._


End file.
